Williams: Wales feel no added pressure

Ashley Williams has stressed that Wales will not panic, despite starting their campaign with defeat

Ashley Williams insists there will be no extra pressure on Wales when they face Serbia in Novi Sad on Tuesday despite their opening World Cup qualifying defeat by Belgium.

Chris Coleman's side lost 2-0 at Cardiff City Stadium as Premier League stars Vincent Kompany and Jan Vertonghen struck for the Group A favourites against the 10-man Dragons, who had James Collins sent off after just 25 minutes.

Since going close to reaching Euro 2004, Wales have failed to mount a genuine qualification challenge, and a defeat to Serbia on Tuesday would severely dent their hopes of doing so on this occasion.

Swansea defender Williams acknowledges it is time for Wales to deliver on the promise shown under Gary Speed. But he stressed the opening result would have little bearing come Tuesday. He said: "There's no pressure. We want to win games but we know you don't qualify after the first couple of games."

He continued: "We want to win every game at home and away. We've put pressure on ourselves to qualify, we want to qualify. It's not good saying we've had a good campaign but we missed out.

"We'll go to Serbia with a lot of confidence looking to win. I think you can see from the last game that we got stuck in and played some good stuff as well. We've got good players, we've got match-winners so we are encouraged from this game.

"I think the Welsh public will be proud of our effort too. You could see a lot of the players were limping, we ran ourselves into the ground."

Williams believes Wales can take positives from their defensive display, even when down to 10 men.

"When you go down to 10 men against a quality team you just try to contain them and I think we did that pretty well," he said.

"They didn't cut us open at all, we were confident in our block defending. We could have easily thrown the towel in but we showed a lot of determination and desire and if we do that in some other games I'm sure we'll get the wins."